Ted Anderson, a salesman of precious metals, was hoping to get some business for his gold and silver dealer when he started a radio network in suburban Minneapolis a few decades ago. Shortly after, he signed a brash young radio host named Alex Jones.
Together they shaped today’s disinformation economy.
The two built a lucrative operation out of a tangled system of niche advertisers, fundraising and promotion of media subscriptions, nutritional supplements and survival merchandise. Mr. Jones became a conspiracy theory heavyweight, while Mr. Anderson’s company, the Genesis Communications Network, prospered. Their blueprint for making money was reproduced by numerous other misinformation sellers.
mr. Jones eventually drifted from his reliance on Genesis, expanding beyond radio and attracting a large following online. Yet they were again closely linked in lawsuits in which they were accused of feeding a fake story about the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School.
Mr Jones was found liable in those cases by default. Last month, plaintiffs’ lawyers dropped Genesis as a defendant. Christopher Mattei, one of the attorneys, said in a statement that Genesis’ involvement in the trial would have diverted attention from the main target: Mr. Jones and his media organization.
The move liberated Genesis, which says on its website it has “established itself as the largest independently owned and operated talk radio network in the country” from the hefty penalties that Mr. Jones is likely to face. But the cases, which soon came before juries to determine the damage, continue to shed light on the economics that help spread misleading and false claims across the media landscape.
The proliferation of falsehoods and misleading content, especially heading into the fall midterm elections, is often attributed to a gullible public and growing partisan divisions. Misinformation can also be hugely profitable, not just for the bold names like Mr. Jones, but also for the companies that host websites, run ads or syndicate content in the background.
“Disinformation exists for ideological reasons, but there is always a link with very commercial interests – they always find each other,” said Hilde Van den Bulck, a media professor at Drexel University who has studied Mr. Jones. “It’s a small world full of networks of people finding ways to help each other.”
Mr. Jones and Mr. Anderson did not respond to requests for comment for this article.
Genesis originated in the late 1990s as a marketing ploy, operating “hand in hand” with Midas Resources, Mr. Anderson, he has said. He told media watchdog FAIR in 2011: “Midas Resources needs customers, Genesis Communications Network needs sponsors.”
Alex Jones and his ominous worldview fit the equation perfectly.
Genesis started Mr. Jones around the time he was fired from an Austin station in 1999, the host said this year on Infowars, a website he runs. It was a complementary, if at times shocking, partnership — “a kind of marriage made in hell,” said Ms. Van den Bulck.
Archived footage shows Mr. Jones, belligerent and prone to pontification, broadcasting horrific claims about the dollar’s inevitable demise before introducing Mr. Anderson, goggles and generally lenient, to deliver elaborate pitches for safe havens. port metals such as gold. Sometimes Mr. Jones interrupted the pitches with tirades, such as in 2013 when he cut Mr. Anderson more than 20 times in 30 seconds to yell “racist.”
Genesis’s roster also features a gay comedian; a former attorney for the ACLU; the Hollywood actor Stephen Baldwin; the long-standing on-call psychologist Dr. Joy Browne; a home improvement expert known as the “Cajun Contractor”; and a group of self-proclaimed “normal guys with normal views” who talked about sports.
But eventually the network developed a reputation for a certain type of programming, promoting its “conspiracy” content on its website and telling the MinnPost in 2011 that its advertisers “specialize in preparedness and survival.”
Several shows were led by firearms enthusiasts. There was a Christian rocker who opposed gay rights and a politician who embraced baseless theories about crisis actors and President Obama’s nationality. One program promoted lessons on how to “store food, learn the importance of precious metals, or even survive a firefight.” Jason Lewis, a Republican politician in Minnesota who faced backlash during the 2018 election season after his airborne misogynistic comments resurfaced, had a syndication agreement with Genesis and a campaign office at Genesis.
The ties between Mr. Jones and Genesis began to loosen about a decade ago, when Mr. Jones reached an agreement to let Genesis handle only about one-third of his syndication deals. According to a review by Dan Friesen, one of the hosts of the Knowledge Fight podcast, which he and a friend made to advance Mr. Jones, about 30 stations are now on their schedule. Of those, more than a third relegated him to late evening and early morning. Several stations replaced Mr. Jones by conservative hosts such as Sean Hannity or Dan Bongino.
Mr. Jones’ relationship with Mr. Anderson continued to deteriorate after 2015, when the Minnesota Commerce Department closed Midas. The agency described Midas and Mr. Anderson as “incompetent” and ordered the company to pay refunds to customers after they “regularly embezzled funds”.
Now the Midas website redirects to a multi-level marketing company that sells the same supplements that populate the Genesis online store. The supplement company founder has a Genesis syndicated show and is also on Mr. Jones appeared.
But Mr Jones has his own company that sells Infowars branded supplements, as well as products such as Infowars masks in addition to bumper stickers declaring Covid-19 a hoax. One of his lawyers estimated that the conspiracy theorist generated $56 million in revenue last year.
“The inability to have such a symbiotic connection between the gold sales at the radio affiliates really hurt their connection,” Mr Friesen said of Mr Jones and his former benefactor. “At that point, Alex was in a bit more of a need to diversify the way he financed things, and Ted kind of took a back seat.”
But in 2018, the families of several Sandy Hook victims sued Mr. Jones, also naming Genesis as the defendant. The families’ lawyers cited Mr. Anderson in the shows of Mr. Jones and said Genesis’ distribution of Mr. Jones’s lies helped to reach “hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people.”
Jones, Genesis and other defendants “concocted elaborate and false paranoia-tinged conspiracy theories because it moves products and makes them money,” the lawyers wrote.
After the lawsuits were filed, both Genesis and Mr. Jones was rejected for liability claims coverage by West Bend Mutual Insurance, which began working with Genesis in 2012, according to court documents. After being impeached as a defendant, Genesis has gone on to solicit donations, saying online that his “freedom to speak is at stake.”
The trial demonstrates the increasingly prominent role of lawsuits as a baton against those accused of spreading false and misleading information. In 2020, Fox News settled for millions of dollars with the parents of Seth Rich, a murdered Democratic aide whose death was incorrectly linked by the network to an email leak ahead of the 2016 presidential election.
Smartmatic and Dominion sued Fox News and other conservative media and figures last year after the election technology companies were targeted by unsupported vote-fraud allegations and seeking billions of dollars in damages. When Smartmatic and Dominion were still threatening legal action, several of the… outlets broadcast segments attempting to clarify or disprove conspiracy theories about the voting system companies.
“For the first time in a long time, it seems to be a very tangible way of actually holding people accountable for the harm they cause and the ways they benefit from that harm,” says Rachel E. Moran. , a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for an Informed Public at the University of Washington.
Genesis told the court in a filing last year that it was only charged with being “a distributor of radio programs — the radio country equivalent of the paperboy — not the author, not the publisher, not the broadcaster.” The filing argued that the company “has no brains; it has no memory; it cannot constitute an intention.”
Lawyers for the families responded that the network should be “treated in the same way as a newspaper or the publisher of a book” with a high level of awareness of “the fake story that Genesis has repeatedly broadcast to large audiences over several years”.
